So Leander posits Apple is prepping a WYSIWYG widget-creation app. TUAW’s David Chartier whines “what took so long?” I can’t help but think, “So what?”
I know I’m not alone in minimal widget use. I see the myriad widgets being created and updated daily fly through my RSS feeds, and I can easily imagine users with 20-30 of these things flying around at once, bogging down their system’s background process time. At least now to create a widget you have to have some Javascript and HTML knowledge, and it helps if you’re design savvy. God help us if “Dashcode” is for real; it will unleash untold useless and ugly widgets on the Mac-using populace.
I do see a lot of widgets where I think, “Hey, that would be cool/convenient to have.” Then I realize that a particular widget wouldn’t be one I would want running all of the time. Then I realize that in the time it takes me to activate Dashboard, go in and make the widget active in the Dashboard environment, and have it refresh, I could just as quickly pull up my web browser and point it to whatever page I needed for the same information.
Ah, you say, but what happens when you’re using your PhischBook some place where you don’t have ‘net access? Granted, this is an instance when widgets would be useful, provided the widget itself doesn’t require an Internet connection to load its information. For my own use, there’s not a non-Internet-using widget out there that I cannot live without. A scenario where such a widget would come in handy when I am without Internet access has not arisen, and even if it had, I believe it would be for something that could just as well keep until I had access again. I probably activate Dashboard between eight and a dozen times a day.
For the record, the widgets I run:
+ Dictionary, Phone Book, Stocks, and Weather, all widgets that come with Mac OS X Tiger
+ SysStat
+ Backpack
+ BibleSearch
+ DailyVerse
+ Scoreboard, during baseball season
I had been using iCal Events, but I’m giving MenuCalendarClock for iCal a try, and am attempting to determine which one I like better for everyday use.
Your thoughts on widgets? What are you running? Drop a note in the comments.
Retrophisch